January 31, 1950
From Cave Painting to Comic Strip, by Lancelot Hogben (Chanticleer Press, New York, $5), is a peculiar book in this respect: Its 230 absorbing illustrations and their captions present a pleasant and temporary barrier between the reader and Mr. Hogben’s text. Man is the only animal that makes pictures, says Mr. Hogben; his thought and progress would be impossible without pictures: numerals—pictures which permit mathematics; and the alphabet—pictures which permit writing. Man communicates through the visual. The author would be the first to understand our turning first to the pictures in his own book.
In deep caves in France and Spain, images of the bison and the reindeer are still visible on the walls; twenty thousand years ago, man painted them as an incantation to secure the real presence of these animals when he set forth to hunt. Later, man sought to give himself an identity through association with the stars in the heavens, and, here, in pictures of Mesopotamian seals, are the first Signs of the Zodiac. Man worried about the seasons, felt a need to measure time. The Pyramids of Gizeh in their east-west alignments permitted the Egyptians to observe the equinoxes; the stone avenue at Down Tor, Devon enabled the observer to note the interval (a solar year) between two occasions when the sun rises at exactly the same point on the horizon; in Peru a sun-tower was hewn from a single rock. All these are pictured in Mr. Hogben’s pages.
The illustrations show the growth of mathematics—first the abacus, then the notation of numerals; the growth of the written word—first signs, then the alphabet. The images came first, then the means of reproducing them, and finally the great presses turning in our cities. Here, too, are the painters discovering perspective in response to the scientific unrest of Europe’s fifteenth century. Finally come comic strips. Mr. Hogben takes them too seriously.
The story Mr. Hogben tells, when we leave the pictures for his text, is one of tragic setbacks, uneventful intervals, and gigantic conquests rendered possible by the contributions of peoples long since forgotten or sunk into apathy. He follows closely the developments which led from prehistoric cave paintings, primitive seals, and calendars, to the invention of the printing press and photography.
Now pictures surround and besiege us. Through television, they silence our thoughts in that last and now insecure refugee of introspection, the bar; we cannot pick up a printed piece of paper without being faced with an image. We are flooded with sights and spectacles—not with the originals, not with the sights and spectacles of nature, but with an intemperate outpouring of reproductions. Nature provides man with one spectacle at a time to which both intelligence and heart can respond; but man now provides himself with a mechanical, kaleidoscopic flurry of endlessly succeeding images. Instead of seeing clearly, he is almost blinded.
Mr. Hogben wants us to inaugurate some system of control. What advertising men call “mass media” are available for the first time in history; Mr. Hogben thinks that they might possibly be used with some intelligence, and that if they are not so used our civilization will follow others that have vanished.
Mr. Hogben is not an impassive historian. He is a fervent champion of federal world government, and very combative about it; he urges us to use the techniques of mass communications to bring such a government into being. Pictures, historically, came before words; in our present plight, Mr. Hogben thinks we must depend primarily on the use of pictures. Unless we succeed in establishing such a pictorial Esperanto, he gloomily contends, western civilization will fall back into barbarism. That is the fate that befalls people who fail to put the means of their communication to good use.
It is here that American mass culture comes into focus. Is it to be used to “coca-colonize” the world? Is it to induce everywhere a gibbering pleasure at the sight of ever-repeated photographs of dancing legs? Mr. Hogben indicts it for wasting invaluable energies on sheer entertainment. “If it is a platitude that America has given the world an object lesson in the popularity of the pictorial medium, it is also a truism to say that America has not as yet contributed to our common civilization any outstanding vindication of its potential value.” His attacks against the American output in general culminate in a criticism of our comic strips. This excrescence on the body of American civilization delights millions of children and adults. Yet Americans have not waited for Mr. Hogben to worry about it and argue whether or not it leads to crime or simply illiteracy, and whether it can be used to teach the Bible and world literature. Mr. Hogben wants to capitalize on the entertainment value of comic strips (to this reviewer highly overrated) in order to promote educational ends.
This emphasis on the comics results from the book’s thesis, which, rather arbitrarily, links all of man’s progress to the history of the means, the action and interaction, through which he communicates his thought. Overemphasizing the role played by the comics, Mr. Hogben stops too soon. Of this trough in which we flounder there is more to be said. Contrary to what Mr. Hogben and others want us to believe, comic strips are at best, or at worst, a minor evil easily recognizable as such. The real danger lies in the uninterrupted use made of pictures for their own sake. Pictorialization has become a wanton habit. We show pictures to fill space. Many of them are not even particularly entertaining; all of them seem essentially stopgaps; they either remain unnoticed, like passers-by in a crowd, or the reactions they arouse are highly confused.
If looked at intently almost any picture will yield valuable information. But it is as if our picture-makers did not wish us to look at any picture long enough or with a concentration sufficient for us to pierce its meaning. They present their material in a manner which effectively forestalls our attempts to grasp its significance. When they put captions to their pictures, they tell us what to see in the pictures; they do not permit, far less encourage, us to look for ourselves. “This girl is smiling because she has a new automobile or a washing machine, or because she is brace and life must march on,” the caption says but the girl is smiling because she has been paid to smile or because the mask of pain is very close to the mask of laughter. But when we look at her, we obey the editorial injunctions.
Our newsreels, documentaries, and feature films are overcrowded with verbal statements. The spectator is in a dilemma. If he wants to watch the picture, there are voices that intrude; if he listens to the voices, then it is the story told, rather than the story seen that dominates his imagination. Generally, the spectator succumbs to the insistence of the voice.
As a result, we are submerged by pictures and at the same time prevented from really perceiving them. The pictures become a veil between us and the visible world, dulling the edge of our intellect, stifling our imagination. We are so exposed to them that they blind us to the phenomena they render. Paradoxically, the more pictures we see, the less we are able or willing to practice the art of seeing. We no longer respond; our perceptive faculties threaten to decline. The incessant flow of visual material from the assembly belt has the soporific effect of a drug, adding to the drowsiness which our kind mass culture tends to spread.
Mr. Hogben loves pictures, believes in pictures, wants us to have even more pictures than there now are. But he wants them to be the right kind of pictures—world-federation pictures. He seems to maintain, in the final chapter of this otherwise stimulating and fascinating book, that world-wide visual education will not only promote international understanding, but also largely reduce the present waste of pictures and thus benefit the pictorial medium itself. This is improbable, for the simple reason that pictures serve many other purposes than those considered by Mr. Hogben. How can we assume that by using them deliberately as elements of a pictorial Esperanto we may succeed in channeling their overpowering flow? Whatever one feels about the desirability of either world federation or such an Esperanto, Mr. Hogben’s plan cannot possibly be expected to become the organizing principle of pictorialization. Mr. Hogben’s program resembles a publicity man’s dream; he is so completely possessed by it that he overestimates its beneficent effect on picture-making in general, as well as its educational possibilities.
Mr. Hogben is a plain rationalist. It is significant that he believes we dissipate our strength by learning foreign languages and remaining faithful to the irrational spelling we have inherited. His dream of a uniform world culture omits the best that culture has to offer: depth.